


Shatterpoint

by diasterisms



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Inappropriate Use of the Force, Slap Slap Kiss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-23
Updated: 2016-04-28
Packaged: 2018-05-22 20:10:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6092611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diasterisms/pseuds/diasterisms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>n.</i> <b>1.</b> fault; the weak place in an opponent. <b>2.</b> fracture; where the unbreakable can be broken.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Patience

**Author's Note:**

  * For [terun0ri](https://archiveofourown.org/users/terun0ri/gifts).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pinch-hit for this year's Reylo Valentine's Exchange. The full prompt was: "Rey and Kylo Ren's space ship crashes down at an unknown planet. Both of their ships destroyed and sunk down the ocean with almost nothing to salvage. But little did they know, that this will change their lives." My recipient wanted "lots of fighting, arguing, bickering, admitting things to each other and making up with each other," and I will strive to deliver exactly that. 
> 
> This is a work in five parts, with each part named after a Rebel Alliance capital ship. The title is taken from a particular [Force phenomenon](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Shatterpoint) that perfectly encapsulates the Kylo/Rey dynamic in this fic. I hope you like this, terun0ri and everyone else! Comments and suggestions would be much appreciated.

_Sky-touched._ That is what foot soldiers call starfighter pilots, an expression derived from _touched in the head,_ which means _crazy._ Finn explains it to Rey like this: "You know how birds always have that tiny glint in their eye, this sort of wild little thought that's frozen there forever, even when they're just pecking for seeds or looking at you while perched on a branch? Like they're half a heartbeat away from flinging themselves into the wind? That's what starfighter pilots have— the best ones, at least. It takes a certain kind of madness, yeah? To strap yourself into a metal death trap and enjoy it. Poe and Jessika are also like that. You all walk the earth lightly."

 

_"Me?"_ Rey scoffs, unsure whether to be puzzled or offended.

 

"You gunned a Corellian light freighter through an _Executor-_ class dreadnought while we were trying to lose a TIE fighter," Finn points out. He flashes the wicked, slightly damning grin that Poe has taught him so well. "Trust me, Madame Jedi—" another Dameron original— "you're sky-touched."

 

*

 

She's thinking about that conversation now as her T-70 X-wing streaks away from the fleet carrier bearing the Resistance's latest purchase of FreiTek military-grade aircraft. No surprise; she always thinks about Finn when she charges into life-threatening situations, allowing herself a moment of doubt to wonder if he'll be okay without her before she invariably decides, _no,_ she's coming back to him.

 

That resolve flickers when a clutch of TIE fighters locks on to her trail. She barrel-rolls to avoid the initial stream of laser cannons, and then thinks about another conversation, more recent than the last.

 

"Take the Phalanx Route to the Outer Rim," Gial Ackbar had advised the _Ocean'_ s captain in charge of retrieving the new aircraft from the Core. "Chiss Space is neutral; there won't be any First Order presence there."

 

Except that the hyperdrive had conked out somewhere along the Vaagari Corridor, leaving the _Ocean_ floating at sublight in the Avidich system. As Rey and the astromechanics hurried through the necessary patches, a First Order fleet carrier— complete with TIE escorts— had uncloaked in front of them.

 

Resistance resources have been severely stretched since the loss of the Republic navy on Hosnian Prime. The _Ocean_ has no escorts— is, in fact, a poorly-armed, poorly-shielded _Endurance-_ class carrier not designed to enter the heart of battle. It's why they had to take such a stealthy, roundabout route back to D'Qar in the first place.

 

_At least I get to test-drive our new fighters,_ Rey consoles herself. Weaving from side to side, she runs her pursuers into the teeth of an X-wing four finger squadron, pulling straight up from friendly fire at the last possible second before arcing down to join the formation.

 

"Nice flying, Red Seven." Commander Juno Eclipse's voice is a calm prickle of static. It would probably take more than this skirmish to faze a former Rebel captain who had once watched her own ship— the _Salvation—_ crash into the Imperial facility where she was being held prisoner. "But cool off on the flat-hatting. All you have to do is keep the eyeballs distracted until we can fix the hyperdrive and make the jump."

 

"Should be easy," Rey declares, noting how quickly the TIEs disintegerate. "These are the flimsy old LNs. They don't even have deflector shields." It looks as though the Resistance's attack on Starkiller Base had dealt the First Order's own fleet a heavy blow as well.

 

One enemy craft seems to be rallying, however. It had broken away from the clutch on Rey's tail, as if it saw through her ploy right off the bat, and— instead of regrouping with the other TIE squadrons— it's now picking off X-wings with reckless, almost suicidal intent. Red Three and Red Four converge upon it in a burst of laser cannons, but the TIE—

 

— leads Red Three into a tight loop and then _drops_ directly onto Red Four, angling so that it slides off the X-wing's hull with nothing more than a metallic scrape—

 

Red Three's reflexes are not as lightning-quick. It collides with its comrade, prompting a fiery explosion.

 

Rey feels the deaths, but doesn't grieve. She's trained herself to shut off during battle. Mourning always comes later, and— she's noticed— with less and less tears as the war goes on. She focuses her attention on the TIE because, kriff, that's one _hell_ of a pilot, probably even crazier than Poe, and she has to take them out before they can do more damage—

 

She's used Force-stun in starfighter combat before. Luke has warned her against it, _too close, too close to the Dark Side,_ but the situation is desperate, they've already lost eight of the new X-wings—

 

The instant she skims the surface of the TIE pilot's mind, she recoils. And not just from the defenses that she finds already waiting.

 

_Rey._ His surprise flares through the distance betweem them. _Did you just try to Force-stun me?_

 

The rage is hot and thick. She could choke on it. _I learned it from you, asshole!_ she shouts into the bond as she thrusts away from her formation, blasting at Kylo Ren with lasers that he ever so methodically deflects with his own before pulling up in a reverse slant.

 

She chases him over the blue-and-green-swirled globe of Ilinalta. She doesn't know if she can actually shoot him down, if she can face Leia Organa with the blood of _Ben Solo_ on her hands, but she figures that she'll make the choice when she's got him in her sights for the killshot. She grits her teeth against the cloying mixture of frustration and relief that wars in her veins with every laser that he dodges.

 

_As much as I admire your persistence,_ he tells her, _kindly check your six._

 

_I can't believe you think I'd fall for that._

 

_We have company._

 

His urgent tone makes her look back, and her throat goes dry. A Chiss star destroyer has just uncloaked behind the First Order's ranks. Without warning, the needle-shaped, kilometer-long ship decimates the fleet carrier in a tumultuous barrage of particle megamaser cannons.

 

Kylo _reels,_ sending a dizzying wave through Rey's own mind. She's barely exulted in this latest loss for the enemy of the Resistance, when hosts of _Nssis-_ class Clawcraft stream out of the destroyer's hangars and engage both X-wings and TIEs alike.

 

A cold and distant voice overrides the Resistance frequency, speaking in a dense, agglutinative tongue. Rey checks with Kylo to confirm that it's hacked into the First Order communications system as well.

 

"What is that?" Red Two demands. "What is it saying?"

 

Rey pieces together what she knows of Minnisiat. "We have... violated Chiss neutrality," she translates, her eyes widening in horror. "We leave them... no choice... but to attack."

 

There is no arguing with the Ascendancy at a time like this, no amount of earnest diplomatic maneuvering that can smooth things over. The fact that the commander used a trade language instead of Cheunh is, for the highly insular Chiss, already a _concession._

 

"Hyperdrive's nearly operational," Eclipse announces. "All squadrons, provide cover fire until my signal to get lines. We make the jump together, copy? No heroics, no one gets left behind."

 

As the X-wings fall back to flank the _Ocean,_ several Clawcraft veer in Rey and Kylo's direction. She assesses her chances and feels him do the same, their mental calculations running parallel to the other. Chiss starfighters aren't that fast, but their S-foils are tipped with L-s7.2 cannons that provide a higher rate of fire. Plus, she is _extremely_ outnumbered. She won't survive the run to the Corridor, so lightspeed is out of the question unless she wants to go in blind, but there _is_ a planet nearby.

 

Specifically, an uninhabited planet without Chiss military presence.

 

"Captain, I've got a dozen incoming and I'm too far from the hyperlane," she radioes Eclipse. "I'll find my own way home. Clear skies."

 

"I said _no one gets left behind,_ Red Seven. That's an order—"

 

"Red Seven, going blue." Rey cuts the link, trusting that Eclipse's common sense will forestall an ill-fated rescue mission. She waits until the Clawcraft are right on top of her, and then she nose-dives into planetfall.

 

To her very great annoyance, Kylo does the same.

 

_So original,_ she jeers as her X-wing roars through Ilinalta's atmosphere, followed by his TIE fighter.

 

_Oh, switch off,_ he gripes.

 

_Hah. You really_ do _have an unhealthy obsession with droids._

 

Only half of their original tail chases them into the skies of Ilinalta, the others possibly recalled to help with the main battle. Six is still too much to handle, though. She eyes a lushly-forested mountain coming up on port side, wonders if she can lose them by cutting a path through the trees.

 

_You can't outmaneuver_ Nssis- _class in that pointer, Rey._

 

_Get spaced._ A Chiss laser glances off her shields. _And stop distracting me!_

 

_The only way we can get out of this alive is if we help each other._

 

_I would honestly much rather die._ She scans terrain until she finds a labyrinth of rocky hills, and then she goes low, jerking hard to starboard while in her mind he sighs and eases to port. The lead Clawcraft fails to make its decision in time, flying into the first hill as its fellows split up, three zeroing in on Rey, two on Kylo. She leads her pursuers through a series of faints and last-minute reverses, managing to crash another one before her X-wing nearly careens into his TIE at the end of the labyrinth. They correct their courses, racing side by side over flat grassland. He's picked off one Clawcraft, too, but the remaining three are the best of the lot, lethal and acrobatic and razor-sharp.

 

_Rey._ He pulls her into the bond again, unveiling his plan. _It's our best chance._

 

A smattering of cannonfire clips her transparisteel viewport. Her shields wince.

 

_Fine,_ she growls.

 

She clears another mountain with a burst of speed, and then she turns to face the Clawcraft over a narrow dark blue bay, with Kylo holding in close behind her. Chiss lasers slam into the X-wing's forward shields; Rey and Kylo return the blasts, his TIE fighter dropping just beneath her X-wing to fire, then rising above to fire again. He uses her as a barricade, staying behind her shields except for the bare second minimum needed to line up a shot.

 

The Clawcraft pilots are startled by such a novel tactic. One disintegrates at the combined onslaught of X-wing and TIE cannons, followed by another one shortly after, the swell of gases and debris rocking Rey and Kylo as they speed past the explosions.

 

_One more,_ he tells her.

 

_I know how to count,_ she snaps.

 

_Concentrate all your shield energy on the rear._

 

He switches positions with her, his TIE now bobbing in front of her X-wing. The last Clawcraft rises above their plane of flight, but falls for their ploy, battering the X-wing's rear shields with a new round of fire. Kylo waits until just the right moment, pulling up from Rey and the Chiss pilot's trajectory. As the Clawcraft zooms beneath him, engaged with the X-wing, Rey feels his wild, fierce exhilaration as his TIE lasers lock on and shoot their last enemy out of the sky.

 

For a moment there is nothing but the aftershocks reverberating in the air, and sunlight on the water, and a sweet, glorious triumph pulsing through the bond.

 

_Brilliant,_ Rey thinks, high from the adrenaline of such tight, economical flying.

 

And then she remembers who he is and what he's done, and her X-wing swerves to face his TIE once more.

 

_Fangs out, I see._ He seems mildly amused.

 

She narrows her eyes in concentration, searching until she finds the ever-present knot of anger that dwells deep within him. She squeezes.

 

A memory, Darth Vader's lightsaber flying into her hand instead of his.

 

The TIE hurtles forward and she meets it head-on. Her instincts are screaming at her to get away, to just burn sky until she sees lines, but the images are all crashing together, Han Solo falling into the mists, Finn crumpled on the snow, her hands bound, red light burning against her cheek, all that fury and all that bitterness moving through her, moving through them both as the TIE and the X-wing set on a collision course over the silent seas.

 

They open fire at the same time. He goes starboard, she goes port. They score direct hits. The world fills with smoke.

 

Rey ejects from the cockpit. Water and trees and mountains and sky blur together. There's a sharp jolt as she lands safely on shore, and then she leaps to her feet and whirls around just in time to see her smoldering X-wing sink beneath the currents. His TIE is doing the same, and he is watching her from the opposite side of the bay, a skeletal figure dressed in black rising from the blue-green shallows. His face is bare.

 

She rips off her flight helmet and runs along the curve of sand that separates them, her hand already poised on the hilt of her lightsaber. He follows suit. The sun is in her eyes, a harsh glare. The bond sings like the edge of a knife. She walks the earth lightly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Glossary**
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Flat-hatting: showing off or engaging in dangerous maneuvers  
> Eyeball: TIE fighter  
> Pointer: X-wing  
> Check your six: look behind you  
> Clear skies: a traditional spacer's farewell  
> Get lines: to disengage from combat and jump into hyperspace  
> Go blue: to head from space into a planet's atmosphere  
> Switch off: the droid equivalent of "shut up"  
> Port: left side  
> Starboard: Right side  
> Fangs out: eager for a dogfight  
> Burn sky until you see lines: to fly until you get to hyperspace
> 
>  
> 
> **References**
> 
> The [_Patience_](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Patience).
> 
> The [_Millennium Falcon_](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Millennium_Falcon/Legends) is a [YT-1300 Corellian light freighter](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/YT-1300_light_freighter/Legends). In TFA, Rey flies it through the [_Ravager_](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Ravager_%28Super_Star_Destroyer%29), an [_Executor-_ class star dreadnought](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Executor-class_Star_Dreadnought).
> 
> The Resistance's [T-70 X-wing starfighter](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/T-70_X-wing_fighter) is an upgrade of the Rebel Alliance's iconic [T-65](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/T-65_X-wing_starfighter). In the same vein, the First Order's [TIE/fo space superiority fighter](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/TIE/fo_space_superiority_fighter) is an upgrade of the Empire's [TIE/LN](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/TIE/LN_starfighter).
> 
> [FreiTek Incorporated](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/FreiTek_Incorporated).
> 
> The [Vaagari Corridor](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Vaagari_Corridor) of the [Phalanx Route](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Phalanx_Route).
> 
> The [Avidich star system](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Avidich_system) in the [Chiss Ascendancy](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Chiss_Ascendancy).
> 
> An [_Endurance-_ class fleet carrier](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Endurance-class_fleet_carrier).
> 
> [Four finger squadron formation](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f7/Four_Finger_Squadron.PNG).
> 
> [Juno Eclipse](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Juno_Eclipse).
> 
> The planet of Ilinalta is my own invention, but the name is taken from a [lake](http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Lake_Ilinalta) in [_Skyrim_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_V:_Skyrim).
> 
> A [Chiss star destroyer](http://media.moddb.com/images/groups/1/6/5991/Chiss_Star_Destroyer_1.jpg).
> 
> An [_Nssis-_ class Clawcraft](http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/6/65/NssisClassClawcraft-NEGVV.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20110531200315).
> 
> The formation that Rey and Kylo fly in is used in the Expanded Universe novel _X-Wing: Solo Command_.


	2. Remembrance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It has been 84 years since my last update because I Am The Worst (TM). I'd planned to put this on hold until I finished [Like Young Gods](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5712727/chapters/13160770), but I found myself blocked until I got THIS chapter out of my system. I've gotten back into the flow of this fic now and am already working on the next installment, tentatively scheduled to post this weekend, so, huzzah! I apologize for the delay and I hope you'll let me know what you think of this fic so far.
> 
> (Also!!! The name of this new planet has been changed to Ilinalta because I thought it sounded nicer lmao I'M A HOT MESS, I'M SORRY.)

He learns how to fly from his father. His first real memory is trying to break Han Solo's record on the Kessel Run. A large, warm palm on his shoulder, callused fingertips tickling the back of his neck, a roguish grin slanted at him from the co-pilot seat. Chewie grunts soft, encouraging noises a little farther behind. They start at Formos, and Ben— for he is still Ben, in this life— cuts the hyperdrive start-up sequence by a full minute, using the Force to agitate the Quadex power core.

 

"That's cheating, kid!" Han laughs, and Ben thinks, _I learned it from you,_ as the world beyond the viewport dissolves into starlines.

 

He brings the _Millennium Falcon_ back into realspace around the Maw. For a moment his eyes are lost in the dark beauty of it, swirls of silver-spattered amethyst against midnight black, and then the duralloy-plated hull is groaning and the sensors are shrieking thin, jagged alarms as gravity begins to rip the ship apart. "This is it," his father is muttering, wild and reckless in a way that fathers shouldn't be, "do or die, kid, come on—"

 

The cockpit shudders with harsh vibrations that Ben feels through his teeth. Jaw clenching, he steers closer to the nebulous black holes lying in wait. Chronos freeze as time is sucked in, the _Falcon_ 's forward mandibles creaking against the pull, straining towards Kessel. He keeps count in his head, Han had shaved off seven parsecs, he needs to do better—

 

But he doesn't. He makes the jump one second too late. Han thumps the dashboard good-naturedly. "So close!" he exclaims. "You clung a little too tightly to the Maw there, son."

 

Ben shrugs. Han ruffles his hair. "Good try, though. Right, Chewie?"

 

An enthusiastic Wookie roar of assent, and Ben keeps staring sullenly out the viewport, willing his cheeks not to burn. "Maybe let's not tell your mother about this, huh?" Han continues. "She'd have my head."

 

Ben doesn't like that, resents being drawn into a secret that pits him and Han against Leia as if she were on the opposite end of some strange, silent war. It's the Kessel Run that Kylo Ren is thinking about on the bridge. How quickly his father falls, how soon it is over. He wonders how many seconds it takes for the corpse to disappear into mist. He forgets to keep count in his head.

 

*

 

The girl's slim figure cuts a path over the sunlit beach as she charges toward him. Kylo runs, too, meets her in the middle, their blades colliding as waves crash against the shore. No time for opening stances. He learned how to spar from his uncle and the opening stance is important, you need a set position for the lightsaber to return to after an initial attack. _We're doing it wrong,_ he tells her through the bond, gazing down into hazel eyes stained red and blue by blade-light.

 

She kicks him aside, leg slamming into his ribs like the dirty little fighter that she is. He staggers, saltwater splashing onto his boots and then rippling around the soles as he whirls to face her again. He belatedly notices that her weapon is not his grandfather's; the hilt is longer, the plasma beam is shaded a deeper sapphire, and it lacks the insistent, humming magnetic field of his birthright.

 

"If you weren't going to use it _anyway,_ you should've just let me have it," he snaps, annoyed.

 

Her eyes widen. Her bottom lip quivers as if she's trying to choke down a laugh, but it emerges despite her best efforts, a throaty little gasp of sound. "You're unbelievable."

 

And she _does_ slip into opening stance, then, her dominant foot braced forward, bony hips angled to the side, one small sun-bronzed finger sliding past the middle of the metal hilt to tap at another activator button. A second blade blazes into existence. He stares at the two lines of blue light that revolve around her wrists to paint deadly sweeps against the horizon. Her teeth are bared. He thinks of wolves.

 

Rey attacks first, closing the distance between them with a series of tight spins. Kylo catches her downward slash, one end of her saberstaff wedged deep into his crossguard, but she spirals again to break the lock and he has to arc his spine to dodge her other beam. The sun slants into his eyes, an unforgiving glare, and he instinctively stretches out his off-hand to Force-shove her away before she can swing at him once more.

 

She is knocked back a few paces, brought closer to the waterline, but it's not long before she retaliates with telekinesis of her own. The Force wraps around him, tight enough for his throat to constrict and for adrenaline to spike at the heady loss of oxygen; she bends her elbow to the sea and reels him in, blur of sand and trees and Rey, and—

 

— _Do not fail me again—_

 

Kylo wrenches himself out of the pull just as he's about to slam into her blade. He twists his body in mid-air so that he slams into _her_ instead. Both of them cry out as plasma beams crackle into each other's skin, as they careen past shore and into shallows, extinguished lightsabers slipping from their grasps and rolling onto the sand.

 

Tendrils of saltwater sting his mouth as he covers her slight frame with his much larger one, pinning her beneath him. His thumbs press down on her collarbones, keeping her head below the currents. Air bubbles escape past her lips before she screws her eyes shut and holds her breath, squirming against him, all wet and slick. Her arms rise over his shoulders as if to encircle him in a lover's embrace, only for her fists to pound on his back. He rolls his hips against hers to keep her still, and, yes, drowning, _yes,_ death by water, an ironic end for a desert rat, waves and sunlight rippling oh so picturesquely over her freckled face, with her nose scrunched up like that and her heartbeat slowing against his—

 

She rears up, with a shocking burst of strength. Their foreheads bang together, a sharp crack of skulls. The pain splinters his vision into a million bright stars and then she's sliding him off of her, and they're both on their feet again, clambering to dry land, gasping and sputtering and summoning their lightsabers, automatically thumbing activator buttons once hilts slap into their palms.

 

Shriek of red. Hum of blue.

 

Something's wrong.

 

"Hey!" Rey shouts, looking indignant.

 

Kylo knows about this, knows how Force signatures can cross when they're wired into even the most reluctantly engineered of bonds. _Mixed signals_ is, in fact, the sum of his relationship with this scavenger girl so far. He should be livid, and he is, but, _Force,_ if she doesn't look so good like that, his scarlet crossguard slanted over her head, the lean muscles of her bare arms straining to maintain control over the inertia of beams that loop in separate directions, red blade-light veiling her hair in a fiery crown. The sight stirs darker desires in him, those fantasies of his that involve her at his side, learning how to channel fury and passion and everything else that Luke Skywalker fears.

 

Her own weapon lies oddly in his grip, with only one end activated. It's been too long since Kylo's held a no-frills blade like this. He doesn't like it, it reminds him too much of _restraint_ and everything about the Jedi Path that he was never able to understand. He flicks his wrist in an experimental swing, his lips curling in distaste at the unsettling effortlessness with which the beam moves through the air. He does not trust the things that come easy.

 

And, all the while, Rey studies him as if she can't decide whether he is predator or prey.

 

The low drum of ion drives breaks the tense quiet. They don't turn the slightest fraction away from each other, but, as one, their eyes slide to the horizon, now dotted by an incoming Chiss patrol, advancing fast over the blue sea.

 

There is no time, no time to do anything else but run for cover. Her survival instincts are sharper than his, and, before he's even aware of it, she's already turning tail and fleeing into the dense forest that edges the beach, cinching _his_ lightsaber to her belt.

 

"Stop running off with my things," he calls after her, grumpily, but she doesn't spare him a single glance as she vanishes into the undergrowth.

 

Swearing under his breath, he holsters _her_ lightsaber and takes off into another section of the forest, before _Nssis-_ class cannons can lock on to him. Kylo knows about tactical retreats. He learned strategy from his mother.

 

*

 

Night falls on Ilinalta in a slow silver wash. Rey plops to the ground, leaning against a moss-coated boulder, chest heaving from exertion. She'd alternated between running and walking briskly for hours, no thought left to her but to evade the roving Clawcraft, the drone of their engines urging her ever deeper into the woods. Low-hanging branches had whipped at her face; thorn-thickets had snagged at her clothes. She'd parted vines and brambles in a graceless crash, stumbling over exposed roots. She does not know how to move through forests, over damp and squelching earth.

 

The hilt of Kylo's lightsaber hangs heavy at her waist. She takes it out and glowers at the black metallic sheen in the moonlight, resting squarely in her palm. A moment, then, of double vision: a boy, too tall for fifteen, brow furrowed in concentration as he slots a cracked Kyber crystal into place. He's muttering to himself, words that Rey also knows, except that he says them with a trace of panic: _The crystal is the heart of the blade._ A brief, punishing jolt of pain spasms through him, causing him to nearly drop the half-constructed weapon. The Supreme Leader is displeased; he must make do without Jedi ceremony, or make do with no lightsaber at all.

 

Rey shudders, forcing herself out of a memory that isn't hers. In her exhausted state of mind, she thinks about distances, how she and Kylo Ren are always staring at each other across distances, first the molten snow-edged chasm of Starkiller Base and then the star-streaked paths of space and then the blue waters of that narrow Ilinalta bay. There is distance between them now, too, in the form of kilometers of dark forest, and— although she tells herself not to— she bridges the gap once more, casting out the net of her mind until it brushes across the surface of his.

 

Whenever they close the distance, it's always an explosion. This is no different, the hot flare of his thoughts lashing against hers. _Where the karking hell are you?_ they demand at the same time. The bond winces.

 

 _Give me back my lightsaber,_ Rey grumbles.

 

 _How can I,_ he snaps, _if I don't know where you are?_

 

 _Tell me where_ you _are, then, and I'll come to you._

 

_So you can get the drop on me? Pass._

 

Thoroughly frustrated, she falls back on childhood tongues. _Chuba doompa, dopa maskey-kung!_

 

 _Pateesa,_ he sneers, so dark, so rich. She blushes, and hates herself for it, shutting down their mental connection with a decisive slam.

 

Rey curls her body around the base of the boulder and tries to get some sleep, figuring her chances of finding Kylo and beating the crap out of him will be better in the morning, after she's had some rest. She doesn't know what dangers lurk on this new world, so she drifts off with her fingers hovered above his lightsaber, ready to draw should the need arise. She falls into dreams of darkness, and red light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Glossary:**
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  _Chuba doompa, dopa maskey-kung!_ = Huttese for "You low-down, two-faced scum!"  
>  _Pateesa_ = It technically means "darling," but there are instances where it's meant in a mocking way  
>  _Kark_ = A Huttese derogatory expletive 
> 
>  
> 
> **References:**
> 
>  
> 
> [The _Remembrance_](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Remembrance).  
> [The Kessel Run](http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/6/63/KesselRun-rgb-lg.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20090818201901).  
> [Quadex power core](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Quadex_power_core/Legends).  
> [Traditional Jedi lightsaber ceremony](http://rpg.wikia.com/wiki/The_Blade_is_the_Heart_of_the_Jedi_%28Lightsaber%29).


	3. Promise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pushed through with weekend update, yay! Thank you to everyone who's read, commented, bookmarked, and given kudos so far. I hope you all enjoy this chapter. *waggles eyebrows at new M rating*

There are two moons in the ink sky, luminous over a pearly silhouette of ice-capped mountain peaks. As he hacks his way through bramble with a lightsaber that doesn't belong to him, Kylo retraces old astrography lessons learned at C-3PO's feet and he comes to the name _the Shatter_ and the fact that it is _the satellite of Wolf Queen, Master Ben, so to say that Ilinalta has two moons is incorrect from a technical point of view—_

 

It was at moments like these that Artoo— whenever it was planet-bound with Luke— would interject with some crude remark, a shrill running beep of Binary, something along the lines of _you're a technical point of view, goldenrod,_ and C-3PO would aim a resounding smack at the astromech droid's domed head. Maybe Ben had laughed at that, but it's more likely that he hadn't. So much of childhood is Han Solo throwing up his hands, bewildered, _sheesh, kid, lighten up a little, would ya?_

 

 _Focus,_ Kylo tells himself, sternly. He had delved into a dead boy's memories to extract pertinent information regarding the two moons, and now it is time to close the door on that thorny, treacherous room that is the past.

 

Eventually he comes to the edge of the woods, and to a steep path carved into the side of a mountain, sloping upwards to a cave that seems as good a place as any to spend the night. He hauls himself over the rocks, and he—

 

— is scaling the innards of the _Ravager,_ his steps disturbing years of dust and silence, the taut snap of his fibercord ringing through an arrow-shaped belly of engineering systems, most of the circuit panels ripped out by people who had gone before him, who had been just as hungry, just as humble, shedding blood and sweat and tears for every single credit beneath the desert sun—

 

Kylo blinks, returning to himself with a sharp gasp. He slinks into the mouth of the cave, allows himself to take the weight off his feet at last, gazes at a carpet of shadow-soft trees and at the Shatter hung in orbit around Wolf Queen. The Shatter is the smaller moon, stained crimson by howling dust storms that wreak havoc on its surface; by contrast, Wolf Queen— Ilinalta's main satellite— is a serene disc of cratered almost-white.

 

 _What were you even doing in Chiss Space, anyway?_ Rey asks.

 

His spine shoots up straight, his head listing to the side to turn his unmasked face away from an unexpected intruder— until he catches himself and remembers that no one is actually in front of him, and, anyway, this is the girl he had no compunctions taking off the mask for in the first place. She's asleep, she must be, or only half-awake, with her voice all hazy and dream-dark like that. He doesn't like the way she sounds, it tightens his throat with thoughts of tangled blankets and morning light peeking through window-blinds, it hollows out his chest with shades of longing, makes him miss days that haven't happened yet and never will. Not even days with _her,_ specifically, just with— someone. Terrible thing, for a boy to grow into manhood alone and starved for touch.

 

Kylo Ren scowls. Ben Solo is watching him from across a span of years, with that same old mournful expression that a father had fondly rolled his eyes at and a mother had skirted gingerly around. _None of your business._ His own voice is harsh in self-defense. _Go away. Keep me out of your dreams._

 

 _I bet you were trying to get the Ascendancy over to your side,_ she muses, hits too close to home. They _had_ been en route to Csilla to start negotiations, but they'd botched their chances for any sort of alliance when they opened fire on the Resistance fleet. He tastes a familiar fear on the back of his tongue, a rush of bile— he wonders, briefly, what punishment awaits him at headquarters.

 

 _Very astute,_ he snipes. _Do junkyard rats scavenge political savvy, too?_

 

She hesitates. A stark realization pierces through him, quickly followed by rage at having wandered into a trap of his own making. Of _course_ his mother took her under her wing. Of _course_ she'd have yakked Rey's ear off with intergalactic policy and the affairs of state, and suddenly he is so tempted to push into her mind a little further, see Leia Organa again even if it's through someone else's eyes—

 

He _screams,_ bringing the side of his fist down on a nearby rock. The crunch of bone is a relief, the pain hot and welcome. He hisses through his teeth, doubles over, laughs a little. He feels Rey wince in her sleep, _mmm, don't do that,_ she frowns, _I felt that, too._

 

This is one aspect of the bond that he hasn't considered before— how bodily sensations can be shared through the Force. He stills within the curved cave mouth, the Wolf Queen moon frozen in his eyes. Warped and debauched place, these pathways of his mind. Horrible, pathetic thing, for a boy to grow into manhood never touching anyone else.

 

Slowly, methodically, he slips his right hand free of its glove, holds his pale fingers to the silver light, the cold rasp of night air against his palm at odds with the warm blood pounding in his ears. Rey shivers, her own fingers twitching over soil, and _he can see her,_ she's sleeping on the forest floor somewhere below him, moonlight filtering through the leaves and dancing wraithlike X-foils across her body as she curls into herself trying to be as small as possible. She lived in an Imperial walker crammed with junk for most of her life, he knows that, he's glimpsed flashes of it in the bond before.

 

_Rey._

 

She doesn't open her eyes, but her drowsy subconscious sends the thrum of a question into him, crooning through his veins.

 

 _What about this?_ He presses two fingertips to the scar on his face, the rough and ridged slash she left him with. _Can you feel this?_

 

 _Yes,_ she hums, _I marked you, you're mine_ , and he's never known her so pliant, shields down. High up on the mountain, Kylo slides his hand along the scar, imagines that it's someone else's fingers touching his face. Deep in the forest, Rey sighs in her sleep, moonlight kissing crosses on the curve of her cheek and the smooth plane of a turned-out wrist. He cradles his own cheek the way his father had after red blaze and before the fall; she's still and silent, but a single tear leaks through the fringe of her lashes, catches silver against her ghostly skin. _Why'd you do it, Ben?_

 

 _Do not call me that,_ he snarls.

 

She wakes. The usual walls come slamming up. He loses sight of her as a pair of forest-colored eyes flutter open somewhere in the back of his mind.

 

He should draw back. He _should._ But, as she flickers out of the dream-realms like a holograph sputtering into view, it stirs nightsong in him, a tense, shameful excitement. Asleep, she had come easy; awake, she is the Maw.

 

Rey lies quietly within the bond, a stalking kind of quiet, poised to leap, waiting for his next move. Kylo does not keep her waiting long; his hand drifts from his cheek to his mouth. He senses the narrowing of her eyes and the clenching of her fist as he glides his thumb over the jut of his bottom lip. He is no longer in control of his own actions, hypnotized as he is by the mere thought of her feeling his lips on her skin.

 

 _Where,_ she huffs, _is your mask?_

 

 _I lost it when you blew up my base,_ he replies.

 

Her triumph pulsates through the bond, a sweet dark thrill at the memory. His anger returns in a white-hot wave; he _pushes_ the light into her head, stormtroopers and ground crew— just as hungry, just as humble, blood and sweat and tears and small lives— screaming as they are swallowed up by fire and smoke, _a million voices crying out in terror, silenced—_

 

She recoils as if it never really occurred to her before, the weight of all those deaths. _Did you think your precious Resistance is blameless in this?_ he demands, cruelly. _Every course leaves a wake, scavenger._

 

At that moment his forefinger is suddenly clamped between rows of invisible, diamond-hard, knife-sharp points— he yelps. She'd brought her own hand to her teeth and bitten _down,_ to make him hurt as well. His clever, spiteful girl, he always knew she had it in her. It's instinct that plunges his finger into his mouth, no thought left to him but to soothe the phantom sting with his tongue. He sucks, and she—

 

— _gasps—_

 

It takes him one second too late to register what's happening. His sensations are still burned indelibly into the bond; on her end, it must feel like—

 

Ben Solo would have been mortified, maybe, but he had also been a strange and awkward creature made of twisted thoughts and depraved impulses that put him at odds with the Jedi Code, and he passed all of that on to Kylo Ren. Sad, sick thing, for a boy to grow into manhood so desperate to take what he could get. He shoves a second finger past his lips, hollows his cheeks over the intrusion, his palm curving beneath his chin, his jaw moving in languid sucks that are wet and slick like she'd been in his arms beneath the sea.

 

Rey's Force signature is all over the place, a mess of jagged lines, a needle spinning crazily back and forth as she lies there with her fingers hooked into someone else's unseen mouth. Kylo feels the strangled cry that tries to fight its way past her throat; his own vocal chords shudder around it, a half-choked sob. _Lonely like you._ He doesn't know which of them is thinking it, or if they're echoing each other. _I was so lonely, like you._

 

 _Usen'ye,_ she hisses.

 

He's mildly surprised that he still has the gall to chuckle. _Make me, cyar'ika._

 

It's his own fault, really, for goading her. He should have known the girl would have a vengeful streak a mile wide. His other hand is braced on the stony floor of the cave, but now it's—

 

— _moving?_ Floating up through waves of air and stardust, before hovering above an unseen neck, and then skimming an index finger over a delicate clavicle, tracing the fine line of bone beneath smooth, warm skin—

 

Kylo panics. He doesn't need the bond to see what Rey is doing now, trailing her own hand down her neck. The mental image suffuses him, tightening below his belly, and he doesn't know what to do with it, so he lets it go, hightailing it out of their connection like a ship going blind into hyperspace, wanting only to escape.

 

The last thing he hears before he retreats behind his own shields is her laughter, mocking, gleeful. _You're afraid,_ she purrs, before he shuts her out, _that you will never be as strong as_ me.

 

*

 

Rey leaves the forest at dawn. A faint pink wash breaks over the metallic clouds as she runs through meters and meters of flat Ilinalta grassland, golden fiber-thin stalks brushing against her cloth-clad thighs while her right hand throbs with ghostly echoes of sensation, the warm, wet vacuum of Kylo's mouth, his teeth nibbling at her fingertips, his tongue darting towards her palm, her thumb grazing the soft fullness of his bottom lip. She's trying to outrun it, the memory, the thrill, legs pumping, heart straining in her chest as she sweats him out of her system, there on the open plain.

 

All around her, several clumps of long grass stir. The air rings with guttural roars as five tusk cats melt out of the foliage, snapping at her heels. She doesn't stop running, but they quickly gain on her in a swift, uniform gallop. Too rattled to use the calming mind technique Luke had taught her to pacify otherwise dangerous creatures, she turns abruptly to face them, with a snarl of her own. Red light shrieks as she plunges Kylo's blade into the belly of the first carnivore that pounces. She draws back the black hilt and the animal slumps at her feet. She kicks the corpse away and spins to face the other four that have fanned out to circle her.

 

They are huge beasts, three meters tall, with powerful, ropy muscles and wickedly sharp, yellowed fangs that protrude from their lower jaws, and the next few minutes are a blur of her— _his—_ lightsaber slashing at their sandstone-furred scruff and their meaty breath clinging to her arms and their claws raking deep gouges into her back. In a way, she welcomes it, welcomes the pain because it burns through the _everything else_ of last night, piercing the haze that's draped over her mind. Kylo's lightsaber jumps and jolts unsteadily in her fists, a new thing, a deadly thing, screaming with too much volatile energy, too much rage and brokenness— _the crystal is the heart of the blade, the heart is the crystal of the—_

 

 _You are no Jedi, boy. You gain your strength from passion, from fear. Come to me and I will turn your fear into something else, come to me and I will make_ them _fear_ you—

 

By the time her last enemy falls, Rey is covered in blood and guts, and spittle and sweat. A little bit of sanity returns with the ebbing of adrenaline; she can't stay where she's a walking target for aerial patrols. She has to retreat into the deep cover of the forest.

 

The bond hums to life. He's awake, then. She feels his consternation rippling through her as he gazes at the carnage, the severed bodies sprawled on the grass with their sightless feline eyes, jaws frozen in final roars cut short.

 

 _I dreamed this,_ he whispers. _I dreamed of you._ His fury whips at her, a shocking conflagration that twists her spine and sends splinters of pain coursing through her system as the wounds on her back are split anew by the sudden movement. _He promised me no more dreams, if only I would come to him._ His voice cracks in her head, sounding like a boy's voice, sounding almost heartbroken by some betrayal. _You made me dream again, you filthy scavenger—_

 

Years of nightmares come pouring into the bond, debilitating, torturous images. A child is bruised and bleeding, raising his arms over his head to ward off his father's fists, while his mother snaps at the two of them to keep it down, can't they see she's busy searching for loopholes in the Military Disarmament Act— a child is crawling through the desert, the sun hot on his spine, his parched throat gritty with sand, while a robed figure wearing a black helm stares at him and sneers, _If I survived this, so can you, blood of my blood—_ a child drowns in whispers and sardonic gazes as he wanders the Senate halls, son of a smuggler, not fit to lick their boots—

 

Rey tears herself from the bond so violently that she sees stars. Trembling, she makes for the forest again, she needs to hide, she needs to heal, she needs to find a way off this damned planet—

 

Again, the coolness. Again, the damp of evergreen. The woods watch her move through dense shadows interspersed with pools of emerald-hued daylight, her boots weaving a hesitant path over soft mud. _Control,_ she tells herself firmly. _Centering._ She will learn to walk in forests. She will learn to walk anywhere.

 

It's not long before she hears footsteps storming towards her, accompanied by the sound of plantlife being cut in half by the hum of a plasma beam. _Her_ lightsaber, she thinks, her vision momentarily dimming with jealousy, her eyes already trained on the spot in the thickets where she knows Kylo will come skulking out of.

 

It's the blue light she sees first, a brilliant sapphire blade winking into existence as it slices through the thorns. And then it's his eyes, rendered a tawny color by droplets of sun. They stare at each other across the dark green distance, much like they had on Takodana, only this time she is a Jedi and there are twigs in his hair.

 

Before either of them can decide what to do next, the ground trembles. _Earthquake,_ Rey thinks at first, but then Kylo cranes his neck to stare at some indeterminable point in the distance, frowning in concentration. She follows his lead, casts out her own Force sensitivity like a net until it snags on a hungry, primal mind moving in their direction. Some kind of predator, like the tusk cats, but bigger and more brutish.

 

She's not prepared for it, for Kylo suddenly running towards her and cornering her against the nearest tree trunk. She yells in pain as the claw-marks on her back slam into the rough bark, and he shakes her by the shoulders as if he thinks this will shut her up, but he only elicits more whimpers from her as her torn skin scrapes against the jagged wood.

 

 _I'm injured, you idiot!_ she thinks at him, viciously.

 

He claps a gloved hand over her mouth. _Then this is going to hurt._ He shoves her around the trunk, sliding the two of them out of sight from whatever beast will come into the clearing at any moment. Bark splinters into her scratches and she—

 

— does not scream, but only because he's flipped his wrist so that his knuckles are now pressed to the corner of her lips, _do it if you have to,_ and she does, greedily, sinking her teeth into the back of his hand with such force that he hisses in spite of the protective leather, his hips bucking involuntarily at her waist. _Should've known you'd be a biter, honestly,_ he grunts, and she only rolls her eyes at him as she continues to distract herself from the pain of her wounds with his half-clenched fist in her mouth, until at last there's nothing but dull throbs raining down her back and an almost delicious soreness in her jaw.

 

She wrenches her face from his hand. He sneers at her, although no one can sneer convincingly when their hair's a bird's nest and the back of their glove is shiny with someone else's spit. The tree shakes as something massive thunders toward it, and Kylo's palms flatten against the trunk, on each side of Rey's head, bracing himself as he leans over her. He's so tall, such a big guy, even if his black clothes lend him a deceptively slim appearance. Instead of making her feel dwarfed, though, his size just fills her with the desire to conquer, just to prove that she can.

 

She's staring at the beauty spots dusted on his high cheekbones when the rancor shuffles into the clearing. It's a grizzled old thing, almost blind, hunched into itself but still ten meters tall, with skin thick enough to deflect blaster bolts and grotesquely long, rangy forelimbs. It draws level with their tree, and Rey glimpses lines of drool beading down from razor-sharp teeth set into a flat brown face. She doesn't dare move the slightest muscle, but Kylo's gaze is fixed on the beast and he's trembling against her, his ragged breath skirting dangerously close to audible. His is a child-sized fear, and, so, bigger than worlds.

 

Perplexed, she trawls the bond until she finds a memory of Han telling a four-year-old boy about the time Luke had been trapped underneath Jabba the Hutt's palace, with nothing but a stick to fend off the monster's jaws. Han had thought the story a gas, a tale to pass the time while Luke sighed ruefully and let him tell it, but Ben's Force sensitivity had already been a wild, raw inferno at that age; it had pulled him _into_ the mental images, _into_ that generational memory, and _he_ was the one beneath the earth, scrabbling vainly at the rock wall while a pair of beady predator's eyes approached, smell of guts and feces, enormous fangs stretched in a parody of a grin, and he would be devoured here in this pit, small and terrified and alone, child of heroes but never as brave as them. His dreams had been filled with rancors for weeks.

 

The beast stops, growls, turns its craggy head toward their tree, filling the air with horrible wet snuffling sounds. Kylo is rooted to the spot, but Rey senses the sob that's about to emerge from his throat. She needs to distract him before he gives away their position.

 

She places firm hands on each side of his head, forces his eyes to her face. _Look at me,_ she commands. _Only me._ He stares at her with blown-out pupils and parted lips and she stares back, holding him steady through it all.

 

His arms shake above her shoulders. _We're going to die._

 

Her fingers slide down his smooth jawline. _There is no death, there is the Force._

 

The rancor growls again, a low rumbling sound, and Kylo ducks his head, so close, so close now, his lips at the corner of Rey's own, his long, lean body pinning her even harder to the tree. Her back is in _agony,_ but he's not considering this, he's lost all rational thought in the midst of his terror, he crowds her up against the trunk and the bark rubs her wounds raw and she's about to scream, and so is he, the beast rearing in their direction, its gusty breaths disturbing the air currents beside them—

 

 _Save me,_ they beg each other at the same time. Terrible, graceless thing, for children to be used as weapons. She doesn't know who makes the first move, perhaps they move together, but, anyway, the end result is the same. They muffle each other's cries with their mouths.

 

*

 

This is not a kiss.

 

Kylo has limited experience in these matters— actually, none at all— but even _he_ knows that this is not what kisses should be like. There's no sweetness to it, and the only heat is one borne of some desperate survival instinct. The girl's lips are chapped beneath his own and his whole mouth is ringing from when their teeth had knocked together in that first fierce surge. His eyes are closed— when did he close his eyes?— and her fingers are trembling slightly as they cradle his face, and he thinks of wings in that moment, tiny wings that beat against his cheeks. To his right the demon is snarling and snuffling, he can almost feel fangs on his neck and he's back in the pit and what kind of thing, to tell hero stories to a boy who doesn't know what to do with them. He buries his sobs into Rey's mouth while she shovels her whimpers into his in return, pain and fear caught between, tangled together until it's impossible to tell where one emotion ends and the other begins.

 

And then they hear it— or, rather, they _stop_ hearing it. The pump of air through monstrous lungs fades as the rancor turns away. Slowly, slowly, lumbering through the undergrowth on its stubby legs, ancient trees creaking and bending before its bulk as if they were nothing more than grass stalks.

 

And then silence, and stillness, and the bond so tense like glass about to break.

 

It hits them both at once, the overwhelming, staggering realization that they're still alive. His knees buckle with relief, causing him to sag against her, and she hisses into his mouth and rears up as the pressure sends a new jolt of pain searing down her back, and the way her body squirms like that against his, chest to chest, slide of hips, he feels it all, revels in the sensations, revels in the fact that he's still breathing, and when she bites down _hard_ on his lower lip to punish him, he automatically bites _back—_

 

Rey stiffens. Kylo feels through the bond just how _offended_ she is that he'd retaliated. And that is funny, it strikes him as funny, he's suddenly chuckling against her mouth, a rusty rasp of sound that he barely even recognizes as coming from him, it's been so long. He's still laughing when her hands drift to his shoulders as if to push him away. It must be the adrenaline high from the near-death experience, he's so lightheaded and, in that moment, so fond of her. That's the feeling that spurs him to run his tongue over the cut on her lip, a soothing, almost apologetic little caress, before he finally lifts his mouth from hers.

 

She shoves him backward, so hard that he loses his footing and hits the ground. They stare at each other, and he's well aware that he's still got a ridiculous little grin on his face, nerve burner, strange boy, wicked child that he is. Her cheeks are flushed and her lips are swollen and she's covered in blood, and of course he's always known that she's beautiful, in snow, in blade-light, in whatever light— but _especially_ in this, the dappled gold and green of the forest, something of the wolf in her eyes.

 

"Your move," he whispers. And he doesn't know why, but he holds out a hand to her, as if in supplication.

 

When she leaps at him, it's like she's going for the throat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Glossary:**
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  _Usen'ye_ = The most offensive way to say "go away" in Mando'a  
>  _Cyar'ika_ = Mando'a for "darling"  
>  Nerve burner = Basic slang for someone who's mentally unstable
> 
>  
> 
> **References:**
> 
>    
> [The _Promise_](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Promise).  
> [Csilla](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Csilla), the Chiss homeworld.  
> [Tusk cat](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Tusk_cat).  
> [Rancor](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Rancor/Legends).  
>  "There is no death, there is the Force" is a line from [the Jedi Code](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Jedi_Code/Legends).  
> Because the planet of Ilinalta is heavily based on Skyrim, [this](http://i568.photobucket.com/albums/ss130/Cubey/Skyrim/ScreenShot57.jpg) is more or less what I imagine the two moons to look like, and [these](https://tespostcards.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/whiterun-plains.jpg) are the grasslands, and [this](https://tespostcards.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/falkreath-forest.jpg) is the forest.


	4. Redemption

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so bad at updating this fic but, on the bright side, there's only one more chapter to go, which I've already started working on. I will finish this story by the end of April, even if it means the DEATH of me. Thank you so much for putting up with your trainwreck of an author!!!
> 
> In this installment, I reference lines from the interrogation scene that are in the TFA novelization, but not the film. Also, this is where we earn our M rating, lol. Feedback would be lovely!

"Force-touched," says Poe. "That is what we call people like you. The older ones, they remember these teenagers, these _kids,_ you know, following the world with eyes that were so ancient _._ It's creepy sometimes, that's what it is. You can do all these dreadful, amazing things, and you're there, but not really. Part of you's always on the outside, looking in." He nudges her shoulder with his. "How's it feel to have the whole universe in your head?"

 

_It's not just me,_ Rey wants to protest, wonders why she's so defensive all of a sudden.  _I'm not the only one who has to live like that. There are others._

 

And she's not thinking of Luke. There's a clipped, academic voice in a room full of metal, telling her not to be afraid.  _I feel it, too._

 

*

 

She pounces on Kylo Ren in a grating scream of red light. He blocks with blue, albeit awkwardly because he's flat on his back on the forest floor. She's straddling him now, their faces separated only by a few breaths of air and two intersecting beams of plasma. His unruly hair is dark against the grass and his eyes are wild in the blade-light and she notices his lashes for some reason, how long they are, how they fan over cheekbones too elegant for the rest of his narrow features. Mismatched mess of a boy. They're both using two-handed grips, their knuckles brushing, clash of fists, live-wire charge of skin and leather, and her heart is pounding this mad drumbeat of a rhythm and her senses are in overdrive from almost dying and the pain pouring through her wounds.

 

Gritting her teeth, she angles the blade just  _so,_ and  _pushes_ the crossguard into his shoulder, searing through black armor. He hisses, spine arching up, trying to buck her off of him, and she instinctively clenches her thighs around his waist to keep him still. She's never had somebody trapped beneath her like this before, it feels like sweet sweet vengeance for the drowning and also like a rush of power that goes straight to her head. He's all heat and hardness between her legs, and she can taste nothing but the blood in her mouth, a mix of his and hers—

 

A memory, not even a few minutes old, the sinuous slide of his tongue over the cut on her lip, that strange and sick delight that had pierced the haze in her head.

 

She's incredibly  _annoyed,_ all of a sudden. He shouldn't be able to make her feel anything that isn't anger or hatred, she's totally going to get him back for this—

 

Rey jerks her wrists away from the blade-lock. Kylo switches to a one-handed grip, swings his arm around her, lightsaber setting a collision course for her nape, and,  _facets,_ she thinks,  _we are all made of facets,_ he exists to her as a pair of widening gold-flecked eyes and splinters of pale beauty-marked skin in that brief window of time when she's bending down with the crossguard blade held out to the side and before she's screwing her eyes shut and kissing him  _hard_ on the mouth, a vicious, close-lipped, punishing kind of kiss that brings time grinding to a halt and, for a moment, chokes off all forest sounds.

 

_Gotcha,_ she exults into the bond. His blade-arm stills, half-wrapped around her like the suggestion of an embrace.

 

When she scrambles to her feet, it's not long before he's standing up as well, stalking towards her with his brows a malevolent slash and his lips bruised, a dot of blood smeared almost to his chin.  _I did that,_ she thinks, surge of pride, shiver of— something else. He lunges with her lightsaber and she parries with his, and the ensuing rhythm of blows that they slip into is ferocious yet clumsy because they don't know how to duel with each other's weapons. The wounds on her back make it impossible to twist the way she likes and the ugly scorched mark on his shoulder stifles his arm's range of motion.

 

Twigs snap beneath her feet as he corners her against another tree. She strains her spine away from the bark to avoid pressure on her injuries, her body curving into his as he glares over the blades crossed at their throats. She shifts her weight, tries to balance better, and in the process ends up rocking her hips against him.

 

His gaze  _darkens,_ and she's not prepared for it, for the way he leans over the pulses of their lightsabers and captures her lips in an open-mouthed kiss that is warm and— oddly gentle, the gentlest thing she's ever felt since she crash-landed on this planet. She closes her eyes for some reason, feels his own lashes flutter shut against her skin, and it's all so new and untutored, metallic taste of their blood and the sweetness of the berries he must have eaten for breakfast. The bond sighs.

 

"Got  _you,"_ he murmurs, against the corner of her mouth.

 

And then of course she's shoving him off of her, using the Force to send him sailing into a wall of thick grayish vines. Cursing, he tosses and turns, hopelessly entangled, and she runs at him and he can't block, this is it—

 

— _or not—_

 

The vines are weighty on her shoulders, rough and prickly against her bare arms. Slithering wisps of sensation, in her confused, heightened state. She hacks at them with the scarlet crossguard, desperate to reach him, to  _kill_ him, but several tendrils wind around her ankles and she trips—

 

He catches her with that long, lean body of his. She can't pinpoint the exact moment when their lightsabers switch off, or when her arms go around his neck. She can't pinpoint the exact moment when she drags him down for another kiss, this one more violent and searing than the last,  _gotcha again._ His gloved hands are on her shoulders and those full, sulky lips are so silky soft against hers, and who knew his mouth would be the most relenting part of him, here in the forest green—

 

She wrenches free, backs away as far as the net of vines will allow her to.  _"Why did I do that?"_ she yells at him, frustrated.

 

He holds her gaze, breathing a little unsteadily, looking for a moment as befuddled as Han had when she  _bypassed the compressor,_ and she almost,  _almost_ expects him to smarm some outrageous, flirty remark like his father would, if the stories that Luke and Leia told her are to be any judge.

 

But, when Kylo speaks, it's in an earnest, logical, slightly condescending tone. It's Leia Organa all the way through. "Sometimes, when we are caught in a survival situation, our receptors go haywire, and—"

 

A hysterical note of laughter bubbles up in Rey's throat. She can't believe he's  _actually_ trying to answer her. She remembers the metal room, how she'd reeled off  _BB unit, selenium drive, thermal hyperscan vindicator,_ and he'd interrupted with a curt explanation that he's _familiar with general droid technical specifications, I don't need to acquire one..._ Ridiculous. Kylo Ren may be dangerous and volatile, but he is  _also_ ridiculous.

 

She extricates herself from the vines as quickly as she can. He cuts off mid-sentence when he notices what she's doing, and then she's sprinting away from him and he's making no move to stop her. His gaze burns the back of her neck as she disappears into the woods.

 

*

 

Kylo's making his way through swampland now, soggy ground, swirl of mists tinted bluish where they catch the waxy sun. He keeps clear of the murky water, for sometimes he glimpses the suggestion of huge tentacles gliding beneath the roots of the aquatic Cambylictus trees.  _Dianoga,_ he remembers. There had been one on the first Death Star that his parents and his uncle had escaped; in the wild, these things grow as big as rancors.

 

He does not know why he left the cover of the forest and the foraging opportunities that it provided. He does not know why he strapped himself into a shieldless TIE and flew straight into a dogfight. If he's being honest with himself, he suspects that he hasn't known what he's doing ever since he killed Han Solo. Much of the time since then had been spent in his room, wrapped in bandages, trying not to move. Snoke had denied him the sweet oblivion of a bacta tank so that the reminders of his failure would etch themselves into his skin. He has quite the collection of scars now, and the crossguard mark on his shoulder is shaping up to be yet another handsome addition. He had never been good at Force healing— even under Luke's tutelage, he had known only how to rip apart, how to destroy.

 

He lifts his gaze to the cloudy skies. Hopes for Clawcraft, maybe, yes, he wants a Chiss patrol to spot him and open fire, and he'll put up a hell of a fight, too, the last stand of Kylo Ren—

 

_My lightsaber!_ Rey snaps, pushing her thoughts into his.

 

He smirks.  _I was wondering when you'd remember that we never actually got around to switching back._

 

She grumbles at him, more irritated than outright enraged. There is a sort of— restfulness— to her Force signature. He prods a little further and brushes across the echoes of the healing trance, like she's just come out of it and she's still luxuriating in the inner serenity that it provides.

 

He is jealous, perhaps, but before he can dwell on it further, there it is again, the unsettling sensation of her eyes opening in the back of his mind.  _Why are you in a... swamp?_

 

_Felt like walking,_ he shrugs.

 

_Walking,_ she repeats, doubtfully.

 

_Walking,_ he confirms.

 

There's a tentative little pause and  _that's that,_ he thinks, expecting her to dart away from the bond. At that moment, however, his eyes rest on a clutch of purple blossoms growing by the water's edge, and he feels a flare of interest from her. A tiny, intrigued pinprick.

 

_You like flowers._ It's awkward saying that, like he's holding something fragile in hands that have always been too big, too rough.

 

_So?_ she bristles, and her shields aren't properly in place, he's seeing a green spinebarrel in a pot inside an AT-AT, he's realizing that anything can survive on Jakku, even himself—

 

— _You have compassion for her,_ Snoke accuses—

 

Kylo does not know why he steps toward the deathbells. He hasn't known what he's doing ever since his father fell. He kneels down so that he— so that  _she_ can have a closer look at the iridescent, draping petals, and he tips them up with a gloved finger, holding them to the light.

 

He should have stayed away from the waterline.

 

Rey's fascination turns into a shrill alarm in his head when a swarm of reddish tentacles erupts from the muddy depths. Seven enormous tentacles all but blocking out the sky, clustered around a fanged maw, reaching for him.  _Get out of there!_ she's screaming, but he doesn't, because, all right, why not like this, on his knees, holding flowers, Ben Solo peering in from the outside and smiling faintly for the first time in years—

 

_Listen, I spent ages on that saberstaff, I won't have it end up inside some karking oversized squid!_

 

Kylo's breath hitches, almost painfully. His right hand shoots out, fingers splayed, freezing the dianoga in place.  _Enough, let it go, slowly,_ his uncle might have said,  _you don't need to—_

 

He stops the creature's heart. He's almost disappointed by how easy it is.

 

*

 

Through his eyes she watches that grotesque thing die. Through his eyes she watches tentacles sink limply beneath swamp water. Nervous, howling Darksider energy pours into the bond, rotting it in her mind. His excitement hums through her, power so consuming that it's almost sensual. Rush of blood and adrenaline, receptors going haywire.

 

She retreats.

 

_Coward,_ he sneers at her, just before her shields go up.

 

*

 

He doesn't look for the girl until sunset, when he's left the swamps for those sleek grassy plains he dreamed her in that morning, spinning and slashing red light amidst a vortex of razor-sharp claws and sandstone-hued fur. He trawls the Force until he sees her. She must have washed off in a stream somewhere; although her clothes still bear remnants of dried blood, her hair is damp, her skin is clean, and she is cross-legged at the mouth of a familiar cave, her eyes closed to the vague outlines of the two moons in the red-gold sky.  _Circles,_ he thinks,  _we move in circles, we retrace each other's steps,_ and he suddenly has the peculiar feeling that they're doomed to do this forever, him and her, locked in orbit, chasing each other around labyrinths, never catching the other, no matter what. 

 

It's an odd, melancholy thought, stirred no doubt by the keen of wind through the prairie and the slow fire burning through the skies. For him, sunset has always been the loneliest hour, he remembers waking up from afternoon naps to the slant of fading light through glass towers on Coruscant, alone and still sleepy, some profound unfathomable sadness in his chest, tears pooling in his eyes...

 

_High noon, for me,_ Rey mutters.  _It would be too hot to go outside. I'd curl up in the Hellhound and hear nothing, no luggabeasts shambling about, no speeders chugging past. Everything on Jakku went dormant at high noon, except my heart, how it would beat so loud in all the silence. That's my loneliest hour._

 

Kylo considers the careful introspection in her tone, fits it into place alongside her posture and closed eyes there on the mountain.  _You're meditating._

 

_Obviously._

 

_Trying to contact Skywalker?_

 

_Perhaps. Shall I tell him you send your love?_

 

Kylo scowls. Rey smirks. But her pettiness has cost her the meditation state; she fidgets, tries to push him out.

 

He—  _clings—_

 

It's like wedging a foot in, just as a door is about to slam shut. It hurts, a little. Where does it come from, his desperation to stay? Maybe the sunset. Maybe his memory of the wolf in her eyes.

 

_Go away,_ she hisses.

 

_No,_ he croons.

 

Rey scowls. Kylo smirks. Circles.

 

*

 

She doesn't even hesitate. She's tired, she needs to reach out to Luke, and she can't do that with his  _nephew_ crowding up her head, and so far there's been one surefire way to send him running.

 

Rey taps deeper into the bond. Shoves her own sensations through it, the way Kylo had last night.  _I learned it from you, asshole._ She goes for something more startling than the collarbone this time, trails her fingers along the inside of her thigh. A light spiderweb of touch. His shock ripples into her, his harsh intake of breath echoes in her  _chest,_ and, just like that, she's thinking of those stolen kisses, the way his mouth had  _moved._

 

She'd expected him to recoil immediately from their mental connection, but he doesn't. He lingers, and it's too late now, it's trapped there in her imagination, a large gloved hand gliding over thin cloth that's suddenly too much in the way.

 

She stops, and he  _groans,_ a strangled sound of longing and missed chances. Perhaps there is power here, too.

 

Slowly, experimentally, Rey resumes stroking along the inside of her thigh. It normally takes more than this from her own fingers to get her going, but it's not just her fingers anymore, is it, someone else is a ghost trailing these splinters of touch over this secret place where nobody's ever been except for her, she's looking at the sun setting like a molten crown over Ilinalta, but she's  _also_ staring into storm-dark eyes gone glassy with the obscure beginnings of desire.

 

Her hand slides between her crossed legs. Presses, just once.

 

And  _that's_ the moment Kylo Ren chooses to flinch. Before he wrenches free of the bond, she glimpses a red flush staining his cheeks. The man's a  _prude._ She has to snort, really. And take comfort in the fact that at least she wasn't the one to blink first. She holds on to this triumph, amplifies it, until it overshadows the faint pang of what feels dangerously like—

 

— _disappointment._

 

*

 

The stars are out. They roll a glimmering silver net over the breeze-swept plains, blades of grass sweeping at the knee that Kylo has folded to his chest, while his other leg stretches out in front of him as he leans against one of the rock shelves that border the prairie and the woods.

 

He studies the celestial field. Tries to recall his Avidich system constellations, only comes up with three: Warrior, Thief, and Atronach. He picks out their shapes, traces them through the star chart that he mentally superimposes on the sky. Or perhaps it's Ben Solo who's doing that, eight years old and hungry for knowledge, the whole universe in his head.  _What is Sith? How do we account for the wake rotation effect of hyperdrives? When is Father coming back?_

 

He shudders.

 

_She sighs._

 

Kylo glares in the general direction of the mountains, silhouetted by the light of the two moons. He's still smarting from their earlier encounter, how he'd fled like a spooked adolescent, how she'd bested him in this, as in so much else. A flicker of rage tightens the knot in his belly, adding to the tension that's been held there all day by memories of her lips and her feral eyes and the unexpectedly supple skin beneath those rags and that ghostly imprint of damp heat on his fingertips.

 

He'd been the first to retreat last night, too. When she'd done nothing more than trace along her collarbone. She must feel such contempt for him now, he wants to knock that smirk off her face, choke it away with his hands wrapped around her throat while he thrusts—

 

_As if I'd let you!_ The indignant screech reverberates through the bond, hitting him like a smack upside the head.

 

_Rey._ He massages his aching temple.  _I didn't think you were awake._

 

_I am_ now,  _thanks to your depraved murder fantasies._

 

_What's a little friendly asphyxiation between the only two people on this entire Force-forsaken planet?_ He tries for snide, ends up sounding strangely bitter, instead. 

 

_Didn't look_ friendly  _to me at all,_ she jeers,  _but I'm probably worried for nothing, you wouldn't have the guts—_

 

He can't remove his glove fast enough. His hand shakes. Lowers.

 

He's had enough of losing.

 

*

 

The truth is that Rey has felt like a caged animal ever since the sunset interlude. If she is to be honest with herself, even before that, even as far back as last night. But she's good at constructing fictions, she wrapped herself in Dosmit Raeh's make-believe life and a family's promise to come back for  _years._ She will wear this one like armor, too, then: that it's solely her own doing, this burning, solely the interrupted tease of her own hand that's lighting her up from the inside. Not someone else's mouth tugging at her fingers beneath stars and leaves, not the clench of someone else's jaw so cold and smooth. Not someone else's loneliness, strumming the taut theremin fields of her own.

 

The truth is that she falls into a fitful, thready slumber after trying for hours to reach Luke. The truth is that she clenches around the abrupt, shocking image of Kylo Ren above her and assumes that it's her dream and is absolutely willing to chase it all the way to the end, until she wakes and realizes he's feeding it to her through the bond. There is something tight and snarling against the walls of her skin— every inch, it seems, is straining, weeping at the slightest friction of cloth, of cave-rock.

 

The truth is that, when he works himself free of his trousers, the animal in her licks its lips.

 

She can see him perfectly in her mind, he's hunched by a rock shelf down in the plains, his head bowed and his dark hair falling into his eyes, his bare fingers like slashes of pale moonlight as they weave over the long grass. Part of her, at least, still has the grace to be mortified, but he pounces on this emotion and looks up.

 

Looks right at her.

 

That can't be possible. She fights the urge to shrink back into the mountainside cave. She's never let him win before, she's not going to let him win  _now._

 

Kylo grins, a warped twist of lips that Rey tries so, so hard not to picture taking root between her bare thighs— but, no, that's a weapon as well, one she can use in this strange standoff they've gotten themselves into. She  _pushes_ the mental image at him and has the satisfaction of watching his grin falter.

 

_Had enough yet?_ she taunts.

 

In response, he narrows his eyes and— with, it has to be said, an expression so determined, so long-suffering that it's almost comical— he begins to stroke. She feels it all through the bond, as if it's her own palm wrapped around the length of him, as if it's her own fingers that he's twitching against. She exhales, slowly, and that in itself is almost too much sensation for the wound-up coil she has become, scrape of fabric over her breasts, the shudder of air leaving her lungs.

 

_Had enough yet?_ he mimics, he mocks.

 

She remembers how he called her a coward when she recoiled from the darkness. It's her turn to glare at him, before she lies back at the mouth of the cave and spreads her legs. Her right hand, she curls wrist up on the ground beside her cheek as she feels him pump into it. Her left hand, she slips into her underwear. Her eyes, she opens to the star-strewn night sky.

 

*

 

He'd only meant to rattle her. He'd planned on stopping once she fled.

 

But she hadn't. And now the evening breeze sighs a gentle song through the grass-stalks, and moonlight pools on the hollow of his throat as he throws his head back, lost boy, mad boy, harder than he's ever been because  _she_ is watching, she is  _feeling_ him come undone. He closes his eyes and he sees her then, all compact curves and toned muscle stretched out over silver-washed stone, and who knew a face could look like that, delirious and tilted up to his forgotten constellations like that, and when her hips arch and she gasps, he almost loses it right then and there.

 

He bites his lip, suppresses the wave. This is a war and he's not going down without a fight. She pulls him deeper into the bond, defiant girl, wasteland girl, and her slick warmth is enveloping the fingers of his unoccupied hand, so tight, so—

 

— _constrained—_

 

With a low, frustrated growl, Kylo slips off his left glove with his teeth. Rey sees him do it, he knows she sees, because there's this flare of wicked delight that hums bright and sharp through someone else, his newly bared fingers are in someone else, someone else is guiding him through the white-hot spirals, through the dark red embers—

 

_I'm here,_ her every phantom touch, her every phantom sensation seems to whisper straight down his spine.  _I'm here, lost boy. I'm here._

 

*

 

_Facets,_ Rey thinks, with the last bit of coherence she can summon from the depths of this haze that drapes her mind in silver and gold. Multiple levels of reality caught in a single moment of time, crystal angles unfurling from one vertex, a Corusca gem held up to the light.  _The crystal, the heart, the blade, the Force, all one._ Here, now, the mountain, the sky, the wetness between her thighs. But  _also_ here, now, the grasslands, the wind, the half-choked moans from Kylo Ren. She feels everything he feels and it's the same for him, his pleasure heightening hers, the two of them caught on the crests of need and wonder and not knowing which parts of them will survive the starlines to come out the other side.

 

*

 

He's chanting her name mindlessly into the bond, over and over, no longer able to hold back whatever tangled threads of thought are left to him as their wrists pulse in perfect sync, fingers curling and clenching in the gaps between the other's rhythm.  _Pateesa, cyar'ika._ He imagines himself panting the words above the crook of her neck, his breath tracing each syllable into the shell of her ear.  _Take me into your dreams of oceans. Let me stay._

 

*

 

She struggles to keep her eyes open, because she sees him on the plain too clearly with them shut, like she's there with him. She wants to wrap herself in the fiction of not wanting. She stares at the stars and tries to coax the swirling heat in her belly towards them.

 

So close. Not enough.

 

Rey bites back a whine. She closes her eyes. Kylo's sharp profile looms before her, parted lips, slack jaw. She falls apart this way, the angles of his face like pale beacons across the distance between them. Like shorelines in the moonlight.

 

*

 

He feels her go over the edge. He follows, the world on fire. Their bodies sink to the ground like sunsets. She drowns him in a blaze of high noon.

 

*

 

Rey wakes from a dreamless sleep to night sky, still.  _I understand now,_ is her first thought. Why he'd begged her, in the snow. Why they couldn't tear their eyes from each other, across the chasm. To hold the Force like this, to have the universe in your head like this, to be so young and to think that you're the only one left.

 

_And then there was you._

 

A sense of disorientation ripples through the bond. Ah. Kylo's awake. He reaches for her, groggily, as if stretching out an arm over an unmade bed in some dark room. Something quiet and melancholic pierces her heart.

 

And then he recoils, fully conscious now. His rage pours into her, and she understands that, too, and matches it with her own. How could they have been brought to this, how could they have crept up on each other like this, mixed signals, receptors going haywire,  _I never asked for any of it, I never asked to be a child of war—_

 

He's standing up. She feels the prairie wind blowing across his face.  _Let's finish this, scavenger,_ he growls.

 

_Yes._ She looks at the two moons in the sky, locked in orbit, never touching. Her hand is already hovering above the hilt of the lightsaber at her side.  _Come to me._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The _Redemption_](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Redemption).  
> [Cambylictus tree](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Cambylictus_tree).  
> [Dianoga](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Dianoga/Legends) (the one in _A New Hope_ was tiny compared to those in _The Gungan Frontier_ ).  
> [Spinebarrel](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Spinebarrel).  
> [Luggabeast](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Luggabeast).  
> Your _Skyrim_ visuals: [deathbell](https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/110/images/70133-4-1443513067.jpg), [the swamps](http://orig09.deviantart.net/b0ca/f/2013/006/f/0/morthal_swamp_02_by_baba64-d5qptf8.jpg).


	5. Salvation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anddd... we're done! Thank you so much, readers. I have treasured every comment, bookmark, and kudos. I had so much fun writing this fic and I'm happy to have had you all along for the ride. My deepest gratitude to the mods of the Reylo Valentine's Gift Exchange for their hard work, and to terun0ri for a prompt that challenged my skills as a writer and allowed me to explore this fascinating OTP dynamic. I remain honored to be your pinch-hitter.
> 
> P.S. I HAVE A [TUMBLR](http://kylorenvevo.tumblr.com/) ALSO GUYS

Kylo Ren staggers through the thorn-thickets and the vine curtains and the tree-trunk labyrinths of the Ilinalta forest past midnight, half-blinded by a gut-roiling watercolor of fury and lingering desire. He plunges straight into a flock of spiny-toothed reptavians flying low over the undergrowth; they surround him, blur of wings and talons, wanting to draw blood like everything else on this planet, including Rey. Sharpness, everywhere, beaks tearing at his robes and slicing at his face.

 

He ignites the lightsaber that isn't his without pause, cutting a path through the screeching creatures. Wings and talons drop in dead heaps at his feet. It has been some time since he fought with a beam so simple and steady and brilliant blue— and, yet, at the corner of his eye, Ben Solo flickers in and out of sight among the tree trunks, a moonlit wraith keeping pace with him, going through all those old forms. _Go away, you're dead,_ Kylo wants to say, but what comes out is—

 

— _Stay with me—_

 

He spins and slashes, each step bearing him ever forward, sapphire illuminating the night, sapphire the last thing that hordes of yellow eyes with slitted black pupils see. In a drab workroom somewhere past, a girl sits on the floor as various components float in the air— adjustment knob, pommel cap, stabilizing ring, Diatium power cell, all moved into orbit around her, wafting on the currents of the Force. One kyber crystal hovers at her breastbone, shedding radiant ocean light.

 

_The crystal is the heart of the blade,_ the girl murmurs to hersef as Kylo ducks and weaves through the gloom. _The heart is the crystal of the Jedi._ He stabs one incoming reptavian right through its leathery throat, sends another slamming into a nearby boulder with a mere stretch of telekinesis-tuned off-hand fingers. _The Jedi is the crystal of the Force._

 

But it's all too awkward, he is too awkward, the hilt longer than he's used to, no crossguard to provide more lethal edges to his swings. The reptavians keep darting at him, an endless wave. His own blood streams down his neck, soaks through his regalia. It occurs to him that getting torn apart by birds is a rather embarrassing way to die.

 

This petty thought is met with a muffled giggle, somewhere in the back of his mind, followed by a flicker of annoyance. _Stop making me laugh,_ Rey chides him.

 

And then she says, _Go. I'll show you how._

 

He thumbs the second activator button. Another beam hums to life, from the other end of the hilt. She guides him through the form that embodies movement— fast, vicious, athletic, all constantly whirling blades and waltzing, flowing footwork. The drawback of him being too tall and broad for such a style is offset by how perfectly suited it is for a saberstaff. The reptavians fall, they fall, they fall. To fight airborne opponents, one must follow the Way of the Hawk-Bat. To leave the desert behind, one must never forget the sandstorms that sharpened the soul, the cyclone breath of R'iia that pushed through the lungs of the land and taught a child how to endure.

 

_I understand now,_ Kylo thinks.

 

*

 

Rey toes the waterline, gingerly. The dark surf roars.

 

In her mind's eye, Kylo has dispatched the last of the reptavians. Bloodstained mess of a boy, chest stuttering jagged breaths. The bond is quiet, tense. Waiting to see who will blink first.

 

_In olden days, they swapped blades, too, sometimes._ He holsters her extinguished saberstaff back at his side. _It was... a show of trust. A way to learn from someone else, to know them more. They called it the Concordance of Fealty._ He's walking in her general direction; she imagines she can hear his footsteps echoing through the forest, towards the same bay that they crashed into and to which she has returned.

 

_There was no_ concordance _in what happened,_ she scoffs.

 

_Is there fealty, then?_ he asks.

 

_You're delirious,_ she tells him. _You're losing too much blood. One of those vile things gored you._

 

_An exaggeration. The beak went no further past my ribs._

 

_Oh, well, in that case, that's all right,_ she grouses, startling an undignified snort from him. It's eerie, this calm that they have slipped into even as he walks to either her death or his, even as she lies in wait here on the beach.

 

_Vile?_ he suddenly wonders.

 

Rey shrugs. _I hate birds._

 

_Hatred is not for the Jedi._ Kylo seems mildly amused.

 

_Maybe not. But it's for scavengers._ She doesn't want to tell him about poor old Teng Malar and the broken hatch and the nest of steelpeckers that ripped him to shreds within ten minutes in the Starship Graveyard; some things, she feels, should remain hers alone— but it's all there, anyway, iron beaks and ragged feathers and helplessness flashing through the bond.

 

_He was the first person you ever knew who died,_ Kylo realizes, and Rey will never understand why that hits her like it had been the right thing to say.

 

Finally, his tower of a figure unfolds itself from the treeline. Her _pulse_ catches in her throat. He moves toward her, celestial silver light glinting off his pale, blood-streaked face.

 

"Wait," she says, "let me heal you first."

 

"No, thank you," he replies with dripping sarcasm.

 

She Force-stuns him. His eyes widen in the half-second before they can't move at all. Rey doesn't know why she does it. Perhaps she wants, vaguely, for this last duel to be on equal terms. Her determined strides sew up the distance of dark sand between them, and he stares at her hungrily, fearfully, like he can't decide whether she is predator or prey.

 

Her palm closes over the hole in his chest. It had missed his heart by only a few centimeters. "No one— _nothing,"_ she says, almost savagely, "gets to kill you but _me."_

 

It sounds like a promise. She reaches out, through the pain, through the flesh, to touch the Force.

 

*

 

She coaxes him back together, skin on skin beneath the hum. A strange, radiant serenity comes pouring in through the cracks, floods his heart with some nebulous dread. He hasn't felt like this since he was a Jedi. Since he was a boy. _Stop,_ he would have told her, if his mouth could move. _Take this away. I don't want it._

 

But she is relentless. She heals his shoulder, too, and the cuts on his face and his arms, and he can't resist, can't do anything except count her freckles and make up constellations in his head. The last stretch of wound closes and her hand drops back to her side, coated in his blood, and he is undone like she slid a knife into his gut, like she tapped a focusing crystal in just the right spot to make everything come crashing down.

 

When he falls to the sand, it is on his knees. When he looks up, it is to her eyes shining over him, curious and intent, the outline of her face traced in silver shards by the night sky.

 

"I put up a barrier," he blurts out. "That's why you can't reach Skywalker. I cut off the pathways."

 

"Okay," she exhales the word slowly. "Why?"

 

Because he doesn't want Snoke to find him. Because he can't bear any version of Hux's smug _I told you so._ Because there is a price for failing the Chiss mission, and he's not ready to pay it yet. Because he hasn't known what he's doing ever since he killed his father. He knows only that he doesn't want to go back.

 

These are the things that Kylo can't say, but Rey hears them loud and clear through the bond. Whatever she sees on his face makes her drop to her knees as well, makes her loop her arms around his neck and pull him close. He should be surprised, but he isn't. His hand drifts up to the point between her shoulder-blades and he lets himself have this. How long since he last held someone this way? He stares at the ocean with its crashing white-capped waves and he breathes in salt air and her and a faint little glimpse of something that feels like _what could have been._

 

"Honestly? _This,"_ mumbles Rey, the words vibrating against his neck, "is the most messed-up thing we've ever done."

 

"I do not disagree," Kylo says carefully, his arm tightening around her.

 

*

 

She has no idea what made her do it. Madness. Loneliness. Or starlight.

 

After a while, he tells her— in the quiet tone of someone accustomed to letting go— that they have to get up now.

 

She bites down on the urge to beg for a little more time. She's never begged for anything her whole life. She won't let him take that away, even if her cheek has somehow pressed to his broad chest like it was meant to be there, even if his hair is soft in those traitorous fingers of hers that have tangled up in it, even if he smells like smoke and rain and forest and other cool silvery things that she is starved for after years and years on Jakku. Slowly, she rises to her feet, extricates herself from his one-armed embrace, tries not to shiver as his fingers trail down her spine and curl briefly at her waist before falling away. He's still gazing up at her with the same expression that had made her crack in the first place, that odd skewed mix of solemnity and longing and also, maybe, a trace of the boy that Han, Luke, and Leia must have loved.

 

Rey steps back. She's put a good several meters between them by the time Kylo stands, drawing the lightsaber hilt from his belt. She follows suit. They stare at each other across the distance, as they seem to always find themselves doing; he might as well be wearing his mask, for all that she can make out of his face in this darkness.

 

"Switch?" she offers. "I'm so done with this Concordance of Fidelity."

 

"Fealty," he has the gall to correct.

 

She shrugs. Fealty, fidelity, whatever. They run at each other. The ocean roars in her ears.

 

*

 

They toss the lightsabers into the air when they're both within striking range. His weapon falls into his palm with a satisfying weight that feels like coming home, and he ignites the scarlet blade just in time to scrape against her blue saberstaff. The two moons beam down on them as they bounce off each other and his crossguard shrieks into the night as he whirls to face her again, his feet sinking into the sand, his heart a wild riot, trapped between the Shatter and Wolf Queen.

 

She leaps at him and it is a vicious, sweeping fight, a deadly lesson in the marks of contact. Her horizontal spinning slashes aim for his upper back, try to cut his legs out from under him while his furious overhand strikes target her arms and her chest. Block, dodge, blade-lock, riposte. His footwork is unsteady on the shifting sands, but it's still an even match because she'd taught him how to move with her form and he understands it now, can anticipate her blows amidst the rain of blue light, rain of wings and talons, same thing. She attacks too fast for him to chain Force-based manuevers into his combat sequences, as he is usually wont to do; when he does gain enough purchase, she shrugs off his telekinetic grip with ease. He's not particularly startled by this, he taught her how, after all, he'd unlocked that door there in the metal room and the snow. He had dragged her to kneel before the eyes of darkness and she had so resolutely, so uncompromisingly stared back, his clever, angry little desert rat, fangs out, always.

 

They fight for a long, long time. It's almost dawn, the sky frayed pink at the edges, the two moons fading from view. She dodges his strike at the last possible second and his blade scours the ground, sending sprays of sand into the air. And, when she comes in from behind, he sees the slash before it happens, all the old forms drifting through his mind, he's not smiling but it's close, _this is it, darling, do or die._ He's practically resigned to the searing pain that slices across his back and envelops his world in white heat. He hears the hiss of a lightsaber being extinguished, and then the sick crack of a hilt jamming into his skull.

 

The ocean is the last thing he sees. Sheets of pale blue water cascade towards him, beneath a swift sunrise.

 

*

 

It's raining.

 

Rey sits quietly at the mouth of another cave carved into the mountainside, this one closer to the edge of the forest, closer to the bone-colored ribbon of beach. She listens to the drizzle's light rhythm as it scatters over leaf and rock with every soft rustle of wind. The first time she ever saw rain, real rain, she had been on Ahch-To; she'd raised her arms to the sky and begged the deluge to wash away Jakku and the sad child she'd been. Even then, someone else's eyes had opened in the back of her mind. Even then, she and Kylo Ren had been watching each other, him and her, circling like cautious animals, waiting to see who would pounce first.

 

She wonders if she did the right thing, and if it had been mercy or judgement. Maybe there's a halfway point. What would you call _that,_ then?

 

_Grace,_ he sighs, from the dream-realms.

 

She does not glance over her shoulder, doubts that much would have changed in the thirty minutes since she last did. He would still be there, stretched out and unconscious, too pale, too young-looking. She tests the barrier again, finds that it still holds even though he's out for the count, and she feels oddly sorry as she imagines what it must have been like for him as a child. What did you do with a voice in your head and power so vast, with an absent father and a busy mother and a detached uncle? Perhaps it would have been easier if he'd had siblings— people to share the burden of all his names. Leia had once mused on that, tired and talking to herself, Rey's presence forgotten in a room full of maps and dossiers.

 

"Maybe you should just stay here." She's talking to him, but her gaze is fixed on the water-stained landscape of Ilinalta, green and gold and blue amidst swirling white mists. "You said you don't want to go back. You ought to live here, then. Learn to hunt, unless you're fine with eating berries for the rest of your life. And I could— stay with you—" Her brow creases; she falters. "Away from the war. Away from it all. Just you and me until the death of the sun. We could be wild things."

 

_Kriff._ Now she's describing her strange fantasies aloud to someone who can't even hear her, someone whom she'd grievously injured. She needs to get off this planet before she completely loses her mind.

 

It lasts for a long, long time, the waiting. The mists are thick wreaths over the trees, the sky grayer than ever. The rain's monotonous silvery tone had once been soothing, but now every beat makes her want to jump out of her skin. Rey's almost convinced herself that she's doomed to stay here forever, that the rain will never let up, that she'll plant roots in this cave and become a stone or a wild thing, standing guard over her strange mad boy caught in the sleep of the dead—

 

— she _looks up,_ sharply, and—

 

— with a roar of distant engines, with a shimmer as the cloak is lifted, with the metal hull breaking through the cloud cover straight and true as any arrow—

 

— the _Millennium Falcon_ makes planetfall.

 

*

 

"Never thought I'd see you piloting a clunky old freighter," Rey teases Poe once she's onboard, although it's hard to say much of anything when she and Finn are preoccupied with trying to squeeze the breath out of each other.

 

"Like I'd really miss a chance to fly this lady?" Poe grins, patting the _Falcon_ 's dashboard. "She's a legend. Made the Kessel Run in fourteen parsecs."

 

Rey doesn't bother to correct him. Sometimes it's not about what something _is,_ but what it means to you.

 

*

 

In Kylo's dream, he walks the swampland again, stopping short at the silhouette of a man cloaked in fog.

 

"You cannot come to me like this," he admonishes the figure, sternly. "In life, you were as Force-sensitive as a rock. I hated that about you. You have no power to be my ghost."

 

The man turns to him. "Kid," he drawls, " _never_ tell me the odds."

 

*

 

There are many things that his father says to him. Regretful things, forgiving things. He loses them all when he fades into the next dream. A workshop, somewhere past. A satisfying click, a resonant hum, as a blue kyber crystal is fitted into place.

 

A girl opens her forest eyes. _The Force is the blade of the heart._

 

Kylo wakes up.

 

He's in a medbay. The ceiling is white, the walls are white, he's wearing white. His wrists and ankles are restrained to the bed by durasteel cuffs that would have been nothing, would have been like mere strings to him, were it not for the energy barrier that flickers in and out of sight. He doesn't even try to prod at it with his own powers. Even after so long, he recognizes his uncle's touch.

 

There is a woman sitting at his bedside. She's staring at him, but he does not look at her. He hasn't seen her in years; what's a few more minutes? He's still gazing up at the ceiling when the word escapes from his lips.

 

"Mother."

 

_All are intertwined: the crystal, the blade, the Jedi._

_You are one._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The _Salvation_](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Salvation_%28Nebulon-B%29).  
> [Reptavian](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Reptavian/Legends).  
> [Ataru form](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Form_IV/Legends).  
> [R'iia](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/R%27iia).  
> [The Concordance of Fealty](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Concordance_of_Fealty).  
> [Teng Malar](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Teng_Malar).  
> [Steelpecker](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Steelpecker).
> 
> In case anyone wants to know, there will _possibly_ be a few more works set in this universe. We'll see. 'Til we meet again, fam!


End file.
